Once-Classified Nuclear Bomb Tests Posted To YouTube For Chilling Reason

Secret no longer.

The Lawrence Livermore National Lab has begun posting films of its U.S. nuclear weapons tests to YouTube, KGO reported Wednesday.

The lab is reanalyzing the footage to improve the data “for future physicists,” nuclear weapons physicist Greg Spriggs said in an interview published by Livermore on Wednesday.

But making the decades-old clips available to the public serves a different purpose. They can remind us “of the immense energy that is produced with a nuclear detonation and hopefully that nobody will ever want to use these things or attack the United States,” Spriggs told KGO. “I don’t think they want to have the retaliation of one of these nuclear weapons being dropped on their country.”

Yikes.

On its YouTube channel that now houses the declassified videos, the lab notes that the U.S. “conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962.” Livermore conducted the ones in its internet archive.

Other bomb tests have popped up elsewhere on the internet but it’s always good to have our collective memory jogged about nuclear weapons’ catastrophic potential.

Here’s one video posted Monday in full: